The commune guidebook

A large scale media campaign entitled Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Earth yet? was launched by American writer Stewart Brand in 1966 in order to incite NASA to produce pictures of the entire Earth. 1968 In 1968, while the first photograph taken by the Apollo 8 Mission of the whole Earth was about to become the most iconic image of the 20th century - making it on the cover of the New York Times on Christmas 1968 - Stewart Brand published the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Catalog - which rapidly became one of the most influential magazines of the counterculture movement - was though as a tool to encourage self-education in the fields of self-sufficiency, ecology, DIY and holism. Re-interpreting the question coined by Stewart Brand in 1966 and using the Whole Earth Catalog as a graphical reference, in his book from 2016 - developed during his thesis at ECAL (Lausanne, Switzerland) - Swiss graphic designer Matthieu Visentin asks Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the Whole Universe yet? Through fresh and dynamic compositions, merging a singular graphic design approach to the 60ies aesthetic, the project aims at being “an exhortation and a guide of rules to build and preserve a commune”, as the designer underlines. Using the story of the American experiment Drop City - which ironically ended in 1968 - as a starting point, the designer asks “why and how every hippie commune shall fail (...).”